Poetic Documentary Movies

Robert Drew shows the sights and sounds from the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in...

The rise and fall of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Vukotić - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner and one of the founding members of the Zagreb...

An experimental documentary on the Magdalene Laundry Institutions in Ireland, told through the myth of the banshee.

Seamus Heaney travels across Lough Erne in Fermanagh, visiting early Christian sites and the settlements of the English and Scots who made their...

The camera floats quietly to capture the beauty that emerges from the mundane. Accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto's composition, Arseny Tarkovsky's poem...

This short documentary, shot in the glass factories of Leerdam and Schiedam, demonstrates how glass blowers do their work. But thanks to the superbly...

A story of The Map and The Territory. Shot in BC, California, and Nevada. Original music by Tashi Townley, Jack Brintnell, Luc Wiebe, and George Lee.

A young filmmaker maintains an epistolary conversation with his deceased grandmother while he rediscovers the space they both inhabited for more than...

In intimate confessions and poetic imagery, the film transforms simple fruit into a profound metaphor for the eternal quest for meaning, love, power,...

A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered...

Syria. Among the ravages of war, there is also this more discreet yet vital phenomenon: exile. Leave, stay? A question Liwaa Jazji tackles. The place...

Women find empowerment behind the red nose and makeup, revealing the playful and subversive spirit of female clowning. Through poetic and intimate...

Documentary-essay short film about a inner/outter trip to the flowery desert in the north of Chile. A student film by Gabriel Lizama AKA Liz Taylor.

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of...

A short film following Anthony, a young child from the small, rural town of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. We see him in different moments of...

This short experimental film tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood to become a star, only to fail and be dehumanized. He is identified by...

This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic...